There are things you wonder why they don't exist. Then there are things where you wonder why only bad implementations exits. I'd so far refused to install messenger apps on my phone. Briar changed that. It looks like they know what they want to exist and are not taking shortcuts.

So far my contact list has exactly one entry: The dude who showed me Briar exists :-)

I wish the Briar project well and congrats to them on this milestone. With that said, here is an essay I wrote in 2015 on "Why Encryption Use Is Problematical When Advocating For Social Change" (prompted from thinking about working for the Briar project): https://pdfernhout.net/why-encryption-use-is-problematical-w... "I believe decentralized knowledge sharing is important, especially for disaster preparedness. I also believe encryption is important in practice, the same way as many people have locks on their doors. Such things do affect a balance between state power and individual power, which is important in a democracy, and they also make it harder for vandals and criminals to operate. So, a project like Briar that supports decentralized communications and encryption is important for those and other reasons. Still, as my father (a machinist among other things) used to say, "Locks only keep honest people honest." Here is a partial list of all the ways a tool like Briar can fail when being used by activists engaged in controversial political actions. ..."

In short, there are many ways that your privacy can be compromised when using networked computers even if your software works perfectly at the application level --- from the hardware, to the firmware, to the OS, to the network stack, to user error, to people you communicate with being untrustworthy.

The conclusion: "If you want to build a mass movement, at some point, you need to engage people. In practice, for social psychology reasons, engaging people is very difficult, if not impossible, to do completely anonymously in an untraceable way. People have historically built mass movements without computers or the internet. It's not clear if the internet really makes this easier for activists or instead just for the status quo who wants to monitor them. If you work in public, you don't have to fear loss of secure communications because you never structure your movement to rely on them. If you rely on "secure" communications, then you may set yourself up to fail when such communications are compromised. If your point is to build a mass movement, then where should your focus be?"

How does this compare to Tox and Ring?

the main dev of tox is kinda toxic to it's own project with kneejerk responses like these: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 and https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121 showing much more enthusiasm than competence when it comes to security and crypto. while the people behind briar i got to know as reasonable and deliberate people.

can't say much about ring, but a few years back i looked at the crypto and it was boring, which some people argue is good, i was not sure about that in this case. dunno how much they evolved since then.

I thought Toxcore was forked and it was going better. As a packager I never had any issue with them, they are helpful in the fork.

Briar works over direct links, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct. Think FireChat.

2 cents: - love the fact you have to meet contact in person to add - forbidding screenshots is great as well - why trust your own repo more than f-droid repo?

I tried to install it on my Chromebook from Google Play and was unable to do so because Google Play indicated "Your device isn't compatible with this version." :-(

This should be fixed in the next release.

Congrats on the v1.0 release, team. Awesome!